A multilayer ceramic capacitor (MLCC) has features including a small size, a high capacitance, and ease of mountability.
Such a multilayer ceramic capacitor may be mounted on the circuit boards of various electronic products, such as display devices including liquid crystal displays (LCDs), plasma display panels (PDPs), and the like, computers, smartphones, mobile phones, and the like, to thereby serve to charge and discharge electricity.
In addition, such a multilayer ceramic capacitor may be used together with a surface mount device (SMD)-type charge storage element mounted on a circuit board and an inductor or a resistor to thereby play a role as a filter or the like.
Recently, as electronic products such as mobile devices have been multifunctionalized and thinned, demand has increased for an ultra-small sized, thin, and high-capacitance multilayer ceramic capacitor (MLCC).
Therefore, as a thickness of a dielectric layer is decreased to submicron dimensions, a density of metal materials such as nickel (Ni), palladium (Pd), and the like, used as materials of internal electrodes is relatively increased, and a volume of a dielectric material with respect to a total volume of a body is relatively decreased.
In order to implement high capacitance within a multilayer ceramic capacitor having the same volume as a conventional multilayer ceramic capacitor, a thickness and a volume of the dielectric layers used as upper and lower covers should be decreased in accordance with an increase in the number of internal electrode layers formed by printing, but defects such as cracks, delamination, and the like, may occur at an interface between an active region which includes internal electrodes and a cover region which does not include internal electrodes.